In my opinion, it should be the majority that gets to decide. From what I have seen, democrats in general tend to be in favor of supporting stem cell research. Plenty of republican women hold the opinion that abortion should be legal, and if that is the case, would agree with embryonic stem cell research. Even if 100% of republican men are against it, if democrats and republicans are anywhere near a 50/50 split, I would bet that the majority is in favor of embryonic stem cell research.

I have mod points today, but I couldn't resist asking: in what possible way is the parent's post funny?Insightful, yes;...but funny?

At work I have a 27'' iMac i7 and I am watching it from a relatively short distance. To give a rest to my eyes, I use a 40'' Toshiba display on a Mac Mini, and a Macbook (as a teleport controller - touchpad and keyboard and secondary display).....

Since I telecommute 2 days a week, watching the big screen from a bigger distance gives a rest to my eyes.... also the office has a horrible fluorescent lighting we usually just turn off, and at home I have a lot of natural light to compensate for the 3 "dark days"...

you do what you can, sitting in front of a box isn't healthy, but the change can actually make a difference

I'm not an ophthalmologist, but I'd hazard a guess that buying a few lamps for the office (particularly with soft, or white-light, energy-saving bulbs) would let your eyes feel more rested than changing to a different monitor at home. This is based on the horribly subjective experience of eye-strain caused by using monitors in dark rooms, assuming you have plentiful daylight in your office this possibly won't be a problem for you.

This paves the way for government (through the dominant political parties) to own the ISPs.

This is a BAD THING, do you really want your login and user data being held on neo-conservative servers?

This act will only demonstrate the demand (or otherwise) of such an ISP service. Once the demand is demonstrated others in the market will likely attempt to offer a service to rival the first entrant. I'd assume that competition based on privacy, freedom of speech and an assumption of innocence would be welcome here on Slashdot. I know I'd happily transfer to their service if they can operate a similar ISP in the UK.

And it's only an appreciable concern in trademark law if the competing product is sold in the same market; Lucas sells movie-merch toys, Wicked Lasers appear to sell a functioning laser. I'm not sure how they could be considered to be 'in the same market,' really.

The majority of users I have contact with resent having to enter passwords/user-verification at all. With banks they do, often at least, appreciate the value of the process. But they still take every opportunity to minimise the process, so what're these users to do when they can't have Firefox (et al) save their username/passwords?

Personally, I'm thinking they'll go back to using Windows, which can't be reasonably prevented by the institution, without cutting off a large user-base. Still, a nice -and, to me, novel- idea.

They've had front-facing cameras and video conferencing technology in Japan for years, but it just never took off like the wireless companies thought it would. Instead, to their complete surprise, texting became the next big thing.

I can't wait to see what the Daily Show and Colbert Report can do with this. They'll sometimes run footage of politicians contradicting themselves, such as a "debate" between Candidate Bush and President Bush. This should give them even more material to work with and call them on their bullshit.

Let's see, doing a random dungeon awards 2 emblems of frost the first time you complete it each day. I'm sorry, but 14 emblems of frost won't buy you anything. All gear you can buy with those costs between 30-95 emblems. You will either need to do this a quite a bit longer, or get these though other means (such as doing the end game content with 9 or 24 of your friends).

Oh, I know about frost badges. My mage is in 3/5 T10.:) I didn't mean the "kill one guy seven times" figures exactly like that (although we could make a case for running one random heroic a day for 7 days giving you ~6 badges a run, enough for T9 head or shoulders). I meant the general design philosophy. I find it really jarring, personally, when quests require you to kill the same guy many times. The way they're going they might as well just make it "kill Hogger 10 thousand times and we'll give you all your Emblem of Triumph gear." The challenge level is the same.

The reason they have this once per day reward for doing the same dungeon, is to help keep a social atmosphere in the game (dungeons are set up to be done by 5 players).

Random dungeons aren't social. At best you get a 'hi' at the start of the dungeon and then it's silent for the rest of the run. Usually I'm gritting my teeth trying to tolerate the incompetence of the random fail DPSers I get.

Wow has set up the model of rewarding skill and dedication, having either will get you good gear, while having both will earn you slightly better gear.

This is true. Maybe it's stopping being the game for me quite so much.:/ I just wish they'd add a proper progression for 5-man groups, parallel to raids. They're sorta getting there with normal heroics, then ToC5, then ICC, but the gap in gear rewards between heroic ICC5s and heroic ICC25 is ridiculous. It's definitely harder tanking heroic Halls of Reflection than anything else I've yet done (up to Rot/Fester in ICC25).

However, I seem to remember LaVey acknowledged that it was exactly that

Having read a lot of LaVey's work when I was younger, most of it was about deciding things for yourself. LaVey's Satanic Bible expressly said you do not need to perform any rituals in order to be a Satanist. It's a bit like Pastafarianism where there are a bunch of "I really rather you didnt's" and few actual "thou shalts". One of the "Thou Shalts" was blind faith, especially about Satanism.

OP doesn't understand the purpose of religion in modern society and was pulling random "hokey" sounding religions out of his arse. Previously religion was about explanation (and control) but today it is more about being social. Thus Wicca, Jedi and what not are more like book clubs or sporting clubs where people with similar ideas, hobbies, likes/dislikes can get together. Even modern Christian/Jewish churches are like this.

I agree with you about the ritual part, but this is part of socialising in general. How many strange rituals go on with hockey or football clubs?

Some of these processes are difficult to sell to a concerned public... vast leaching fields - piles of dirt with traces of what you want in them, and then lawn sprinklers to spread sulfuric acid all over the pile and let it drain and wash out the desired minerals. Acres. Hazardous chemicals. Misting lawn sprinklers. Yum... fun stuff.

If you're relying on only 15-20 other downloaders to certify something as "clean" and you regularly download warez you probably already have a rootkit on your system and have no idea it's even there.

Well, that's the fun part: most people don't care as long as it doesn't interfere with their life.

Security is always a trade off. In this case, it's being able to do what I actually want to do (you don't want to go raiding with WoW on wine, trust me), as opposed to doing other stuff I could do on Linux but don't want to. When I want to do what Linux is good at, I dual boot or fire up a separate box.